And Peter I. Bogucki, an associate dean at Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, said that an interdisciplinary approach to engineering, rooted in the University’s liberal arts foundations, has long been apart of engineering at Princeton.

“We believe that this type of undergraduate education yields graduates who will make a broad impact on society through leadership in engineering, commerce, education, government, and whatever else they set their mind to doing,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Narayanamurti said the report should be seen as a guide rather than a rigid prescription.

“The Academy’s report is an important guidepost,” he said. “Harvard is already doing many of the recommendations.”

Bogucki agreed that at many top schools, the report will not dramatically change the engineering curriculum.

“What will increase, however, will be the formalization of interdisciplinary affiliations, in the form of faculty joint appointments and institutes that bring together people from different fields,” Bogucki wrote in an e-mail.

The report also included a number of other recommendations for engineering schools.

In particular, the report recommended that the B.S. degree—which is, at Harvard, a small program that graduated only 17 of the 1590 students in the class of 2005—become a pre-engineering degree. By contrast, MIT grants exclusively B.S. degrees to its engineering students.

The report also recommended that schools do more to recruit undergraduates to the study of engineering and encourage them to continue their studies into graduate school.

Finally, the report called on the engineering community to improve general public understanding of the science, particularly through the development of pre-college curricula.

—Staff writer Adam M. Guren can be reached at guren@fas.harvard.edu.